


I’ve been here before

by Emjen_Enla



Series: Prompted Works [31]
Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Cave-In, Claustrophobia, Dysfunctional Family, Episode: s03e05, Episode: s03e06, Gen, Implied/Referenced Parentification, Implied/Referenced Pedophilia, Kidnapping, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Season/Series 01, Traumatic Brain Injuries, World War I, tunnels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:54:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23084332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emjen_Enla/pseuds/Emjen_Enla
Summary: (But always hit the floor) Or the unhappy relationship of Tommy Shelby and tunneling
Relationships: Johnny Dogs & Tommy Shelby, Tommy Shelby & Freddie Thorne, Tommy Shelby & William Letso
Series: Prompted Works [31]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1366669
Comments: 3
Kudos: 37





	I’ve been here before

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deadendtracks (amonitrate)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amonitrate/gifts).



> Title is from "Writing's on the Wall" by Sam Smith.
> 
> Well, anyone who follows me on tumblr knows I've been working on this fic longer than I was working on the aro Tommy fic, but @Josiepug kind of beat me to the punch on this one. That's actually a bit unfortunate because her fic is better written and better researched than this one is. Hopefully you enjoy it anyway.
> 
> Also, this is sort of a request for @Deadendtracks, because I once mentioned I thought Tommy had claustrophobia and she said she'd like to hear more about it. I responded by writing this fic. Hopefully this answers all your questions. **shrugs**

The worst part of it all was that they’d thought tunneling would be better. Up in the trenches men spent their time hiding in sodden, disgusting trenches getting shelled only to be sent over the top to die among the barbed wire for no reason. The chance to get out of the trenches and away from the shells seemed too good to be true at first.

Of course, it had been too good to be true. Tommy Shelby wasn’t sure why he’d expected it not to be. Hadn’t his life been full of enough misfortune to learn that anything that seemed too optimistic inevitably was? He probably deserved this for his stupidity.

Turned out the tunnels were just another type of hell. Instead of trenches, there were long, dark, close tunnels. They were poorly lit and not safe. You ran the constant risk that the tunnel might just collapse and bury you alive, or that the enemy would stumble into your tunnel and try to murder you. There was also the issue of gas, for which you had to carry a canary. The canary had smaller lungs than you did, so it would pass out before you if the air went bad and give you a chance to escape.

Even though things were objectively about as bad as they’d ever been for the Shelby brothers, Tommy tried to keep up a brave face. Arthur had too volatile a personality to be trusted to keep in control without someone telling him what to do and that everything would be okay. John was more stable, until he wasn’t, and even Tommy had never been able to figure out how to accurately predict his reckless outbursts. If they were all going to survive this, Tommy needed to be in control as always. This was not new. Tommy had learned as a child that ultimately, he was the only one who could be counted on to keep his siblings safe, together and moving towards anything even resembling a goal. That didn’t change when buried under the mud far farther from Small Heath than any of them had reasonably expected to go.

Things weren’t exactly going fine, but they at least held together for a while, until even that luck ran out. This was during what was easily the biggest operation the 179th had ever undertaken, so there was obviously a lot of room for error. By this point Tommy had been able to worm himself into a rank high enough where he had enough control to keep Arthur and John in places which were reasonably safe. Tommy was pretty sure they hadn’t noticed, because since when had anyone in the family ever noticed what he did for them? Still, it made him feel better to know that his brothers would not be going deep into the tunnels to lay charges.

Instead his team was himself, Freddie Thorne, William Letso, Danny Owen and a few others. This was a comfortable grouping which they had been working in for most of their time in the tunnels. Tommy knew he could never get away with protecting Freddie, because his best friend could tell when Tommy was maneuvering people out of danger and would put up a stink. Besides, it did wonders for Tommy’s peace of mind to know Freddie was watching his back.

Unfortunately for them, their luck had run out.

~~~~

In the years that followed, Tommy would claim not to remember the collapse in the rare instance that he was actually cornered into talking about it at all. That was not really true. Sure, the doctors who had seen him in the aftermath had diagnosed him with a concussion amongst so other things, but it wasn’t bad enough to cause memory loss. He remembered even if he did his utmost to never think about it unless his nightmares made him.

Still, it was hard to piece what he remembered into a coherent whole. It had all happened so fast. One moment he’d been laughing with Freddie and Will and the next there had been an explosion and everything had shaken and the lamps were going out the ceiling was pouring down around them…

That must have been when he hit his head, because he was fairly sure he’d lost time then, not much though because the next thing he knew he was pinned down with French mud all around him, holding him in place.

He had been buried alive.

Panic surged through him and he struggled, trying to find a way to escape. He couldn’t tell if he was close to a part of the tunnel which wasn’t collapsed or not. Could he even dig himself out or was this where he ended? Were his last moments to be spent choking on mud, buried in the middle of a hell-hole somewhere in France?

Something grabbed onto his arm and pulled him forward. He was hauled bodily out of the dirt and into open air. He collapsed into another person’s body and arms closed around him. Tommy wasn’t sure how he knew it was Freddie, but somehow, he did. They clutched at each other, panting for breath, buried under so much dirt.

It took him a few minutes to calm down enough to notice the darkness. It was very dark in the tunnel. Not dark like the house on Watery Lane at night when everyone was asleep, or even the kind of dark if you were inside a narrowboat with the lamp doused. This was a completely different kind of dark. It was so dark that Tommy couldn’t even see the outline of Freddie’s head, and they were still clinging to each other. He had never experienced darkness like this before, it was all-consuming and suffocating. Tommy kept blinking and blinking and blinking, trying to see something, _anything_ , but there was nothing. It felt like the darkness was closing in around him to crush him. It was almost as bad as being buried in the mud.

“The fuck-” Tommy began, not quite sure what he was going to say. Vaguely, he was aware the Freddie could only have found him in the darkness by sheer luck.

His rising panic must have been audible because Will responded from somewhere in the darkness, “I’m working on it. Don’t panic.” He sort of sounded like he needed to take his own advice, but Tommy was too busy trying not to panic himself to point that out.

He listened to Will rummaging around blindly in the dirt and debris, presumably looking for the lantern. Will was swearing out loud and continuously, which Tommy got the impression was his attempt at staying calm. “What the fuck is this? And what—oh god-” he retched audibly.

“What is it?” Danny asked, his voice high and brittle with panic, Tommy hadn’t even realized he was there. Tommy could feel Freddie craning his neck to look in the direction of Will’s voice.

“You really don’t want to know,” Will said, sounding faint.

The realization that Will was faltering gave Tommy the push he needed to finally disentangle himself from Freddie. Tommy had always been good at realizing when people needed someone else to tell them what to do and then at being the person doing the telling. “We need to find the picks,” he said beginning to pat his hands along the ground in the opposite direction of Will’s voice. His whole body was tense, he was afraid every move he made would send the rest of the tunnel collapsing down on them. The darkness made it hard to breathe. “Once we do that we can plan.”

The four of them patting around in the dark for what felt like ages. The darkness got closer and closer and Tommy’s panic grew. His hands shook so hard he could barely tell what he was feeling. He felt like he was going to scream, the darkness was another kind of constriction.

“Here’s a pick!” Danny exclaimed around a burst of panicky breath. Dimly through the ringing in his ears, Tommy heard him fiddling with something.

“Is the lamp there too?” Freddie asked, sounding eager.

“No, and we couldn’t light it even if there was,” Will said.

“Why?” Freddie sounded even more panicky.

“We’d run out of oxygen faster,” Tommy said. Freddie made a little gulping noise of terror.

They patted around in the suffocating blackness for a few more minutes and were able to come up with two more picks. Once that was done there was only one thing to do and that was figure out where to go from here.

From their searching it seemed like the tunnel had caved in on both sides of them, leaving only a few meters of tunnel still standing. He, Danny, Will and Freddie were the only ones in it. The rest of their team was simply gone. Well, actually they weren’t “simply gone”; it didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened to them. Tommy tried not to think about it; especially he tried not to think about whatever Will had accidently touched.

“We need to make a plan,” Tommy said because he needed something else to think about and because someone needed to be in command when everything went to shit and he was used to it being him. “Do we have any supplies?”

It took them a few minutes to finish gathering together everything useful that had survived the cave-in. There were a couple shovels, one canteen of water and a little whiskey. There were cigarettes but lighting them in their current predicament would be sheer foolishness. There was no food. The canary in its cage was also nowhere to be found, so they could be breathing in poisonous gas and not know it. Not particularly encouraging, especially since command would probably assume they were dead and not bother looking for them.

“We’re dead, aren’t we?” Freddie asked. “Just like the others, only we’re going to die slowly.”

That kind of talk could not be tolerated. Tommy had learned a lot about leading others through bad situations in childhood and one of things he knew was not to let others talk about bad things like they were assured. If everyone was convinced failure was inevitable it was impossible to get them to do the things necessary to turn the situation around.

“We’re not dead,” he said with a lot more conviction that he privately felt. “We’re getting out of this. We’re not dying here. Not like this.”

Even though he couldn’t see Freddie, Will and Danny, he knew he had their attention; now it was time to act. “What are we going to do then?” Danny asked tremulously.

“The only thing we can do,” Tommy said. “Start digging.”

~~~~

It took Tommy, Freddie, Will and Danny several days to dig their way out of the tunnels. When they finally managed to claw their way beaten and weak into the sunlight again, they found that they had been the lucky ones. Most of the 179th had vanished beneath the mud never to be seen again.

They Will had been gone long enough that they had been considered dead too. Command had not allowed the members of the 179th to look for their buried comrades and instead had moved right onto new tunnels. By the time Tommy next saw sunlight, a letter to Polly announcing his unfortunate demise was already enclosed in an envelope, ready to be mailed back to Small Heath.

Arthur was drunk beyond coherence when the news reached what was left of the 179th, but John had been sober enough to come running. Tommy had been leaning tiredly against Freddie when suddenly he was literally knocked over by his semi-intoxicated and sobbing younger brother. That had been unexpected to say the least. Tommy had an unfortunate reputation about crying clinging on from childhood when he’d cry when people drugged horses, and Arthur had always been a bit too emotional for his own good, but John had never been a crier. Seeing John cry was an unexpectedly terrifying, and only served to drive home that Tommy needed to make sure nothing ever happened to him and left John and Arthur to fend for themselves. So even though he hadn’t eaten in days and the medics kept babbling on about dehydration and concussions, he let John drag him back to the trenches to see to Arthur. He pointedly did not think about what had happened. He didn’t think it mattered. It wasn’t like it was the first time he’d almost died.

~~~~

In this matter—as with most other things—Tommy Shelby was good at forestalling the inevitable crash. Freddie developed a fear of small spaces from the whole fiasco, which showed up within days. However, until the fighting was over, Tommy seemed fine. In fact, until the fighting was over, he was convinced he was fine. It wasn’t until the danger was over and there was time to stop moving, that the fact that he was not, in fact, fine began to show.

Three nights after the armistice, Tommy dreamed of the cave-in for the first time. This could have been the first dream he’d had in over a year, or it was possible that the real world was so hideous that he’d simply been unable to tell the difference. Regardless, in his dream he was back in the tunnels, and the ceiling was creaking ominously over his head. He tried to run, but the earth crashed down on his head before he could make it to safety. The weight of the battlefield pressed down on him, trapping him. He struggled but he could not get free. He tried to hold his breath, but eventually he had to breath but inhaled nothing but a lung-full of dirt—

Arthur rolled over and one of his flailing arms hit Tommy in the face. Tommy jerked upright, staring blindly into the darkness. He doubled over hacking into his lap until he gagged, trying to get the feel of dirt out of his lungs.

“Tom?” John asked, raising his head groggily from Arthur’s other side. “You alright?”

“Fine,” Tommy choked out around all the dirt in his throat and lungs. Logically, he knew that was ridiculous; he had inhaled no dirt, but it felt like he had. The dug-out they were sharing with a few other members of their company felt too small. He couldn’t stop imagining the ceiling collapsing down on top of them. He needed to escape.

He stumbled to his feet and out of the dugout. The November air was cool against his skin. He ran his hands through his hair and tried to control his shaking. This was pathetic. It had just been a nightmare; it wasn’t like he’d never had those before.

“You alright?” a voice asked.

Tommy whirled around. Freddie was sitting next to the entrance to the dugout, wrapped in his blanket. Tommy had forgotten Freddie didn’t sleep inside anymore.

“I’m fine,” he said. “How are you?” he almost winced at how that sounded.

Freddie just gave him a look. “We both know I don’t believe you,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Tommy said. Denying things never really worked with Freddie, but he tended to respect if you just said you didn’t want to talk about something.

Freddie sighed, but didn’t push. “Well, at least come and sit down,” he said opening the blanket invitingly. “It’s cold.”

Tommy didn’t necessarily want to sit with Freddie and face the other man’s prodding about what was going on, but if he didn’t he really had no choice but to go back into the dugout and that was something he really didn’t want to do. Slowly, he crossed over to Freddie and settled down next to him, pulling the end of the blanket over his shoulders. They sat shoulder to shoulder in silence for a long while.

“It’s going to get better from here, Tom,” Freddie broke the silence.

“And what gave you that idea?” Tommy asked.

Freddie snorted. “Because it can’t get any fucking worse.”

Neither of them realized it, but this was the last truly friendly moment they would ever share.

~~~~

Tommy wouldn’t say that he liked his plan to get the money from the Russians, but he also didn’t have any better ideas. Actually, that was not quite accurate. He _had_ had better ideas, but none of those had included almost dying from a traumatic brain injury. Now he was three months behind schedule and having trouble coming up with anything better. Too bad Tatiana wasn’t going to let things be postponed any longer.

So, that left the tunnel. It wasn’t necessarily a bad idea, especially if this whole fiasco drew out as long as Tommy thought it was going to. The problem was that Tommy liked it when he had the ability to supervise every aspect of his plans, and there was no way in fucking hell that he was going into that tunnel. In fact, privately, he was fairly sure he’d literally rather die.

Over in France, he had made a lot of incorrect assumptions about what coming home would be like, and one of them was that those days in the tunnels wouldn’t affect him anymore. He’d learned his mistake fairly quickly. During those first few months home, he would jerk out of nightmares only to find that not only his room but the whole house was too close and dark. Logic didn’t work in these situations, so his only choice was to go outside. Sometimes he wandered around Small Heath like a ghost until the sun rose. Other times he didn’t even do that and Polly found him sitting on the curb in front of the house and had to coax him back inside for a breakfast he couldn’t eat.

This was on the list of things that the opium had made more bearable. When he was smoking his pipe, he would still wake up suffocating on the closeness of his bedroom walls, but he was able to light a lamp and stay put, which was important if you were trying to maintain an illusion of sanity which felt incredibly fragile sometimes. During the day he avoided tight spaces. When that was impossible he generally could hide his panic as long as the place was well-lit. He did a lot of hiding, and sometimes he was good enough at it that he almost managed to fool himself into thinking he was alright.

This was not one of those instances. Tommy knew a tunnel was beyond him. He didn’t want to know what would happen if he tried going into a tunnel now, and regardless of how much it irked him not to be able to supervise the digging, he was not going to try to figure out. As a result, he’d developed the plan with the assumption that he would have nothing to hands-on to do with digging the tunnel or robbing the Russians’ treasury. Still there were some things that surprised him about how the whole thing was panning out.

“You know,” he told Will as they leaned against the side of one of the buildings of Charlie’s Yard watching the rest of the tunnellers gathering supplies. “When I called you and asked if you knew what had happened to anyone else from the 179th I did not mean to imply that you had to be part of this project.”

Will looked up from lighting his cigarette and frowned. “Why would I not be part of this project? I don’t trust half these idiots not to bring the thing down on their heads.”

Tommy tensed at the mention of the tunnel caving in. When he’d first mentioned that he was bringing in tunnellers for the next phase of the plan, Arthur and John had tried to convince him to let them dig the tunnel with the help of members of the Peaky Blinders. Tommy had flat out refused for a number of reasons, one of which was that he didn’t trust Arthur and John’s tunneling abilities. Another was that he knew that if his brothers were going to be under the ground he’d have no choice but to be down there too to keep an eye on them. “Henry’s a good enough tunneller for this job,” he told Will instead of saying any of that. “It’s not going to be as difficult as it was in France.”

Will frowned even deeper. “I mean, he’s not bad, but he’s not as good as us. You and I were the best tunnellers in the 179th. What’s this about, Tom?”

Tommy lit a cigarette so he had an excuse not to look at Will when he replied. “I’m not going to be helping with the digging.”

“Why? Don’t want to get that fancy suit dirty?” Will joked, then sobered. “But, really, I understand. John mentioned you’ve been sick; it’s probably best if you don’t push it.”

Privately, Tommy thought that getting your skull cracked counted as a lot more than just being sick, but if Will had been talking to John he probably knew what had really happened and just didn’t think he should say it. People had been walking on eggshells around Tommy since Grace had died and it had only gotten worse after the head injury. That was something that would have be rectified at some point, but for the time being it was tabled until standing for long periods of time didn’t exhaust him.

“Still,” he said taking a long drag of his cigarette and narrowing his eyes. The sun was starting to peak over the yard’s rooftops and the light was giving him a headache. “I don’t want to force you to do anything you’re not comfortable with.”

If he’d been talking to anyone else they probably would have been shocked by the fact that he was actually asking, but while he wrote Will a letter every month, they hadn’t physically seen each other in years. Tommy hadn’t had a reputation for not caring about other people’s feelings back in France, so he didn’t expect Will to think much of the statement, which was why he was surprised when he noticed the other man looking at him oddly. “What?” he asked.

“I’m not afraid of the tunnels, Tom,” Will said calmly, he looked away and took another drag on his cigarette when he spoke, like he was aware he was breaking an unspoken rule by saying it out loud. “Those tunnels tried to kill us all those years ago, but they didn’t. They tried their hardest, but we still beat them in the end. I refuse to be afraid of an enemy I’ve already vanquished.”

Perhaps Will had a point, but that didn’t make Tommy feel any more positively about going into a tunnel ever again. “Well,” he said stubbing out his cigarette and throwing it aside. “If that’s how you feel, then I’m glad to have you onboard.”

~~~~

It turned out Tommy had been wrong in saying that he would rather die than go down into a tunnel ever again. There was one thing which could make him go down there, and that was Charlie.

The whole plan was getting away from him. They needed the tunnel finished tonight if Tommy was going to be able to placate Father Hughes. He was trying to be hopeful that Michael would take the priest out and rescue Charlie as soon as possible, but he wasn’t hopeful enough. There was a good chance that Father Hughes was still going to be alive at the end of his deadline, and if that was the case they needed the jewels.

The difficulty lay in the fact that the digging of the tunnel was going a bit slowly. The problem with hiring tunnellers out of the remnants of the 179th was that the men who were willing to revisit tunneling were mostly novices who had none of the trauma associated with the experience that the experts did. They knew how to dig tunnels, but they weren’t fast. All the fast ones but Tommy and Will were either dead or not stupid enough to dig a tunnel ever again, and there was a limit to what Will could do on his own while trying to keep his underlings from making a mistake and burying them all. They were in a bind and the only thing Tommy could think of to do was go down into the tunnels and help regardless of how he felt about it.

He didn’t really remember what he’d said to Johnny Dogs when he’d pulled up at the tunnel site. Someone up at the big house would likely notice his car—especially since it was technically Tatiana’s car. Once the Russians realized things were missing someone would connect the dots, but he didn’t care; as long as Charlie was safe he’d fight the Russians for the rest of his fucking life with thanks.

He hadn’t even approached calm since they’d realized Charlie was missing. He’d started shaking on the way back from his run-in with Alfie, and it had gotten so bad that Michael forced him to pull over and let him drive. However, once they’d gotten back to Watery Lane and Michael had gone off on his mission to murder Father Hughes, Tommy had been driving again. He’d managed to stop shaking, but he was no less panicked.

That was probably actually helpful, because under normal circumstances he had no idea how long he would have needed to prepare himself to go into a tunnel again. As it was, he was so focused on saving Charlie that he barely faltered before throwing himself down the ladder into the tunnel.

Kneeling on the dirt at the bottom of the ladder, he stared down the tunnel stretching out before him. It was better lit than the ones they’d dug in France, but that did not hide what it was. It was still a tunnel with nothing but some flimsy wooden beams holding it up. His stomach turned over, and his breathing sped up. He gritted his teeth against the panic. _Charlie_. He reminded himself. _You need to do this to save Charlie. Get moving. You’re running out of time._

With that pep talk out of the way, he was able to force himself to crawl forwards. Vaguely he was aware that he was ruining a very expensive pair of trousers, which was about the least of his problems right now.

He crawled forward, embarrassingly aware of how tense he was. It must have been obvious. He cursed himself for his weakness. It was just a tunnel, and a much better built one than the ones in France.

It took him a minute or two to find one of the tunnellers. The man visibly jumped when he saw him. “Sergeant Major!” he spluttered. “What are you doing down here? Have you come to inspect the tunnel?”

Tommy didn’t recognize the man, which likely meant he’d been a very new recruit at the end of the war. “Where’s Will?” he asked, instead of answering any of the man’s questions. He had things to do and no time to do them.

“Up ahead,” the man said, nodding further down the tunnel. “He’s been doing a lot of the digging, trying to speed things up. We know that you’re on a deadline, sir.”

If only the man knew exactly how tight a deadline. Tommy headed down the tunnel. Will was all the way at the end of the tunnel, just as Tommy had been told he would be. Tommy tried to estimate how far from the wall to the treasury they were. He had the measurements that Johnny Dogs had told him over the phone that morning before everything had gone to shit once again. Knowing that, he really should have been able to estimate how much progress they’d made, but he couldn’t. He kept being distracted by how close the sides of the tunnel were and by how much dirt was suspended precariously over his head. _Focus, you idiot._ He reprimanded himself. _Remember why you’re down here. Charlie, remember? You need to save Charlie._

That was actually probably not a good thing to remind himself of, because thinking of Charlie in the priest’s clutches was not a thought that was going to make him any calmer. He swallowed back bile. “Will,” he called.

Will jumped—whether because he’d been so focused on his digging or because he hadn’t expected Tommy to be down here was hard to tell—and turned to face Tommy. “Tom?” he asked. “What are you doing down here? Did something go wrong?”

“Yes,” Tommy said. Normally he didn’t like admitting when things went wrong, but it was a little hard to avoid in this situation. “Things have gone very wrong. The tunnel needs to be finished tonight.”

“Tonight?” Will looked from Tommy to the end of the tunnel and back again. “I mean, we’re making steady progress, but tonight is a bit of a-”

“That’s why I’m down here,” Tommy said. “You said it yourself. You and I are the fastest. We’re going to finish this tunnel and get those jewels tonight.”

Will still looked skeptical. “Not saying I doubt our collective abilities, Tom,” he ventured. “But that’s still a tall order…”

“My son was fucking kidnapped,” Tommy growled through clenched teeth. They needed to start digging. Every second they didn’t spend missing lowered their chances of success. They needed to _act_. “The people who took him want the jewels we were planning to take. I need to give them to them by tonight.”

Will’s whole expression changed. Tommy could tell he wasn’t necessarily any surer the tunnel could be finished tonight, but he was willing to give it a shot now that he knew what the stakes were.

“I need a pick,” Tommy said, trying not to hunch his shoulders in preemptive defense against the dirt above him.

“Alright,” Will said. If he noticed Tommy’s posture he didn’t comment. “We’ve got a lot of digging to do.”

~~~~

And so, they dug. They’d done a lot of digging in France, but never with this speed and fevered intensity. They dug as fast as they could, cutting down to the smallest number of supports they could without compromising the safety of the tunnel. Tommy dug until he could barely breathe, then dropped back and let Will take over. When Will got tired they switched back. It was hard to judge who was able to last the longer period of time. Will hadn’t spent most of the last three months bedridden from a major head injury, but Tommy’s kid was currently in the hands of literal evil. As a result, they had about the same amount of stamina.

Things were actually going fine until they hit water. Will had enough sense to know that digging under these conditions was a bad idea and that they should stop, but Tommy refused. If they stopped and waited for the tunnel to drain, they would miss the deadline and they wouldn’t be able to get Charlie back.

They kept digging. The tunnel was becoming slick with mud. It became hard to maintain a grip on the picks and to keep from sliding around. With everything so muddy it was hard to ignore how precarious the ceiling above them was.

As much as Tommy was focused on getting the tunnel dug and Charlie safe as soon as possible, nothing was able to completely remove the reality of that fact that he was underground again. As the tunnel got muddier and muddier, it got harder and harder to ignore. His breathing began to speed up and his hands began to shake. The ceiling was too close. It was only a matter of time until it collapsed and buried them for good this time.

“Tommy,” a hand closed around his upper arm and he lashed out with his pick in a blind panic.

“No, knock that off. It’s just me,” Will dodged the clumsy swing of the pick and took hold of his wrist to stop another one. “Now is not the time to panic,” he said quietly.

“I’m fine,” Tommy gasped because it would probably kill him to say something else.

“We both know that’s not true,” Will said in the same, gentle soothing voice, it was the same kind of tone as the one Tommy used for spooked horses. “Take a couple deep breaths. It’s alright.”

Tommy tried to obey. He didn’t dare close his eyes, because the darkness behind his eyelids just made the whole space feel even more constricting. He stared into the lamp until he eyes started to water and tried not to think of all the earth pouring down on top of him. He tried to breathe, tried to make breathing take up all his focus.

“Is this because of your son?” Will asked quietly. Tommy didn’t respond. “Or is this from being down here in the tunnels again?” he continued.

Tommy flinched.

“I thought so,” Will mused. “Back when you first told me you weren’t going to be helping us dig. It made logical sense that you wouldn’t be helping given your injury, but I thought your insistence that I didn’t have to help dig and your inability to understand why I would want to were strange, but this explains it.”

Tommy would have done something to defend his reputation if he had any breath left, but as it was all he was able to do was glare.

“You can head back to the surface if you need to,” Will said still speaking in that gentle tone of voice. It was starting to drive Tommy mad. “You don’t have to do this.”

“My son has been kidnapped,” he said, managing to find his voice and keep it relatively steady. “I really do need to do this.”

“I can do it for you,” Will said.

“You won’t be fast enough on your own,” Tommy said. Fortunately, arguing with Will had given him enough distraction to regain at least some of his control. He pulled his wrist free of Will’s grasp. “We need to keep going.”

So, they kept digging. Tommy tried to focus on beating back his panic. Will was humoring him for now, but he didn’t trust that the other man wouldn’t find a way to have him dragged back to the surface if he panicked again. If he missed the deadline to bring the jewels to Father Hughes and lost Charlie for good because he couldn’t keep from panicking down here, he would never forgive himself.

Time underground blurred together. Tommy wasn’t sure how long they’d been down here. It could have been an eternity for all he knew. He was just starting to think that they were never going to reach their goal at all, let alone in the time allowed, when Will’s pick struck stone. It was the wall to the basement room where the jewels were kept. They’d made it.

They laid the charges and scuttled back along the tunnel to get out of the way. Exactly how far back to go was a bit debatable because the tunnel was muddy and they had been digging quickly. Eventually they hunkered down against the walls and Will lit the fuse. Tommy stared fixedly at the light of the lantern, trying to avoid seeing the walls of the tunnel out of the corners of his eyes. He tried not to think about all the mud over his head pouring down on top of him, but that was impossible. His breathing began to speed up again.

“Tom,” Will jabbed at his thigh with his foot, leaving a muddy boot print on Tommy’s expensive but already destroyed trousers. “I don’t think we’ve ever blown a hole in the wall of a building like this before. What do you think it’ll do in the long run?”

Tommy’s first thought was that Will was worried about the whole mansion falling down and his panic must have shown on his face because Will backtracked quickly. “It’s not going to fall. The hole’s not going to be big enough for that. I was just wondering if it’ll do anything to the structure overall. Maybe they’ll have to repair the whole side of the building ten, twenty years from now.”

Tommy nodded numbly.

“That’d be funny wouldn’t it?” Will asked. “If that happens we’ll have to have a picnic and watch them fix it. We could laugh at all the trouble we caused them. Owners of a posh place like this need some trouble.”

Tommy cleared his throat and managed to find words. “I own a posh place like this now,” he said.

The charges went off, rocking the whole tunnel. Some mud from the ceiling rained down on them. Tommy curled into a ball and waited to be buried but the shaking stopped and they were all still alive.

“See?” Will said with a grin that said he was trying not to make things any harder than they had to be. “It’s fine. We’ve done the impossible and finished this tunnel on your enemies’ impossible deadline. Let’s go get some jewels.”

After the dank, close tunnel, the cellar full of riches felt like the most spacious room Tommy had ever been in. Will climbed through into the cellar after him, and whistled. “Look at this,” he said. “How did you say they got all this stuff out of Russia again?”

“I didn’t,” Tommy said. He wasn’t about to repeat Tatiana’s stories, especially since he wasn’t sure if he believed them.

Will poked around a little, digging through a whole box of necklaces and rings. “You know, it doesn’t seem like these people are doing all that badly for refugees. I mean, they’re living in this place and they’ve got all this.”

“They’re fucking insane. Don’t ask me to try to psychoanalyze them,” Tommy muttered, picking through the jewels and trying to remember which ones they’d agreed on when he and Alfie had come down here. He didn’t want to risk Father Hughes’s wrath by not bringing the right riches. His head ached and his cursed all the events of the last few months. He’d never had trouble remembering details before his head injury, so he hadn’t thought to write anything down the first time he’d been down here. He’d since learned his lesson and bought a notebook, but that did not help him in this situation.

Will was quiet for a minute. “You know the people were starving.”

Tommy was so focused on trying to find the right necklaces that he was momentarily confused. “What?”

“The Russian people,” Will said. “Before the revolution. They were starving, while people like the cowards living here gorged themselves on the riches which could have made life better for everyone. It’s sick.”

“You a communist now, Will?” Tommy asked.

“Don’t sound so surprised,” Will said. “You and Freddie introduced me to communism in those tunnels in France.”

Tommy couldn’t exactly deny that. He and Freddie had talked about communism a lot at the beginning of the war, before both Tommy’s faith in class revolution had drowned in the mud along with his belief in God. He shrugged and went back to the jewels, he started putting the pieces of jewelry he remembered on the table in the center of the room.

“You know before he died Freddie wrote me too,” Will said. “Actually, we met up a couple times. I went out to lunch with him and your sister once or twice. They told me, and I quote, ‘Tommy Shelby doesn’t believe in anything anymore.’ Is that true?” When Tommy didn’t reply he went on, “I don’t understand what happened to you,” he said. “You used to have such high hopes for the future. What do you call what you are now?”

“Pragmatic,” Tommy said and went back to sorting jewelry.

“How is getting rich off a criminal empire pragmatic?”

Tommy turned to look at Will for the first time in the conversation. “Do you really think people like the ones upstairs or the people like the ones who have been blackmailing me for months or the members of fucking Parliament are just going to step aside if we make enough noise? It doesn’t matter how many injustices we point out or how loud we shout; they don’t care. They’re so far above us that they can afford to just ignore us, and if we get too noisy they can always send a bunch of soldiers out to shoot us. Forgive me for not wanting to put my son in the line of fire of a Lewis gun!”

“Tommy,” Will pointed out. “Your son was kidnapped because of your capitalist schemes!”

The worst part of it was that Tommy couldn’t argue with that statement. He knew that what had happened to Charlie was a direct result of his decisions and therefore ultimately his fault. The same held true for Grace’s death. The same held true for a thousand other disasters over the years. It wasn’t something he let himself think about all that much, but that was only because he wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep going in the face of how disastrous his failures always were.

Thankfully before he had to say anything in response, another tunneller poked his head out of the tunnel with a few cloth bags so they could carry the jewels. The man’s eyes practically popped out of his head at the sight of all the riches, but Will waved him back down the tunnel before he could comment.

“Okay, Tom,” Will said opening one of the bags. He had obviously decided to table the conversation. “What’s the plan for attack?”

~~~~

They pilfered the riches that had been part of the deal first, or rather, they pilfered the riches Tommy remembered as being part of the deal first. Then they topped the bags off with anything else that looked valuable to their admittedly untrained eyes. Tommy figured that it would be good to have a little something extra to placate Hughes with, especially since he wasn’t sure he had the right jewels. It felt like he’d been under the ground working on the tunnel and now stuffing jewelry into bags for eternity. He’d completely lost track of the time. How long had it been? How much time did he have before Father Hughes’s deadline? How much time before he lost his chance to save Charlie?

As anxious as he was, when the time came to head back into the tunnel, he banked. Somehow the tunnel seemed even darker and closer coming from this direction than it had when entering from the surface. It hadn’t collapsed yet, but they had been in quite the hurry towards the end so it still could collapse at any moment. It could—

“Tom,” Will jerked him out of his spiral with a light touch on his arm. “Just this once more. We don’t even have to do any digging. All we have to do is get in and crawl to the other side. It’ll be fast, I promise.”

None of that made Tommy feel any better about the idea of going back into the tunnel, but if he didn’t he wouldn’t be able to get the jewels to Father Hughes. Charlie was in danger; he had no choice. He took an unsteady breath and crawled back into the dark.

Heading back was relatively quick. Tommy didn’t get any calmer, though, because while he and Will had been in the treasury, the other tunnellers had been stringing the whole tunnel with explosives so they could collapse the tunnel. Tommy didn’t think it would do much to hide their tracks, but he had to agree it felt like a necessary step. Still, he didn’t like having to crawl back by surrounded by explosives set with the express purpose of bringing the tunnel down.

Tommy was near hyperventilating and sick from fear by the time they finally reached the ladder leading up to the surface. His hands were so shaky he had trouble climbing, but he made it and then he was finally, finally in open air once again. His head swam and he didn’t even try to stand. He simply hauled himself up out of the hole and collapsed, rolling slowly onto his back as his gasped for breath. The world faded into a haze

Vaguely he was aware of Will scrambling up the ladder after him. He was at his side in seconds. “Tommy? Tommy?” When Tommy didn’t respond, he swore aloud and slapped Tommy’s face, at first lightly, and then harder. “Tom!”

“Is he alright?” Johnny Dogs asked from somewhere above him, his voice panicked.

“Do I look like I fucking know?” Will snapped. “Help me get him onto his side.”

They rolled him onto his side. Will was grumbling under his breath. “Stupid—How long has it been since his injury?”

“Three months?” Johnny asked, the statement phrased as a question.

“Three—fuck-” Will swore. “Did he get clearance from his doctor to, I don’t know, _dig a fucking tunnel_?” Johnny must have shrugged, because Will swore again, even more vehemently.

Tommy wanted to tell them that he could hear them, that they should stop talking over him, but he couldn’t form the words. The truth was that the first thing he’d done after pouring the morphine down the sink was cancel the next appointment he’d had with his doctor. He still hadn’t rescheduled it. The last time he’d seen the doctor he’d been told to keep taking the morphine and not to do anything either physically or mentally strenuous— _and yes, that includes returning to work, Mr. Shelby._ He highly doubted the man’s recommendations would have changed, so he had just avoided them. It had sort of surprised him how readily the rest of the family had accepted him back into his role, only Ada and Lizzie had really questioned it; everyone else seemed to have just decided that if Tommy was back he must have fully recovered.

Will swore again. “Help me get him over by the fire, and one of you get some water!”

Will grabbed his shoulders and Johnny grabbed his ankles and they carried him over to the fire Johnny and the other Lees had set up to maintain the illusion that they were just a random Roma camp. One of the other tunnellers found a blanket to lay him on, and another brought one to drape over him. By this point he was capable of trying to push them off. This whole thing was humiliating.

“Get off,” he slurred, shoving weakly at Will’s arm. “I’m fine.”

“Really?” Will asked. “You’re really going to try to argue that when you can barely move?”

Tommy tried to sit up, but Will pushed him back down. “Just stay there for a minute.” He looked around. “Is anyone going to get any water?

One of the tunnellers came running, and within seconds Will was propping Tommy up so he could drizzle water into his mouth. Swallowing was more difficult than it should have been, but he was slowly becoming more in touch with the world again. It was very quiet. He pried his eyes open and saw that all the tunnellers were standing around in silence like someone had died. It was a bit disconcerting, he was used to people deferring to him, but not to this kind of obvious care for his wellbeing. He made another attempt to push himself up, and this time made it to a sitting position. He looked at Will, who was crouching next to him looking like he was preparing to catch him if he keeled over.

“What time is it?” he asked, forcing his voice to be as steady as possible.

“Tommy, you need to lie back down.” Will said. “You’ve really overexerted yourself and I don’t know what will happen with your head being the way it is.”

“What time is it?” Tommy repeated. He needed to know. Had Charlie been rescued? Had Arthur and John blown up the train? He needed to know what had happened. There was no time to waste sitting around. “What’s the time?!!!” he roared when no one immediately responded.

One of the tunnellers fumbled for his pocket watch and told him the time. It was after the time he’d told Arthur and John to blow up the train if they didn’t hear from Michael, which meant Charlie was either rescued or the train was blown up and Tommy needed to get the jewels to Father Hughes as quickly as possible. He needed to know which is was, and to do that he needed to get to the nearest phone. He’d spotted on by the side of the road while he’d been driving to the campsite, but it would take him at least twenty minutes to get there. He needed to get moving. “What did you do with my coat?” he asked Johnny.

“I’ll get it,” Johnny said and he hurried off towards one of the vardos.

“Tom,” Will put a hand on his arm. “Please lie back down.”

Now that he was a bit more conscious, he could tell how dry his mouth was. “What happened to the canteen?” he asked.

“Here,” Will offered it to him. Tommy took it, but his hands were shaking so much he almost dropped it. Will helped him hold the canteen as he drank. All he could taste was mud.

By the time he finished drinking Johnny was back with his coat and shirt. He shuffled his filthy arms through the pure white sleeves, effectively ruining another article of clothing more expensive than a week of meals when he’d been a kid. His hands were shaking too much for the buttons, so Johnny did them for him, despite his protests that he was fine.

When Johnny was done with the buttons, he sat back on his heels and he and Will stared at Tommy with expressions like they were either waiting to see what he was going to do next or judging their chances of stopping him from whatever he was going to do next. Tommy snorted in derision and took the canteen from Will. This time he could keep his hands steady enough not to spill anything. When he was done drinking he set the canteen aside and reached for his waistcoat, which was in the pile of things Johnny had brought over along with his shirt.

“What exactly do you think you’re going to do, Tommy?” Will asked. He didn’t actually sound like he was really wondering, if anything he was starting to sound resigned, which was good because Tommy didn’t have the energy to fight him on what needed to be done next.

“I need to get to a phone booth and call back to Arrow House to figure out what happened while we were underground,” he said, managing to navigate the buttons of his waistcoat, then reaching for his suitcoat. “I put some other plans in motion along with this one and I need to know what happened with them before I can decide how to proceed.” He couldn’t decide if it was hilarious or pathetic that he was trying to pretend he wanted to call about anything other than whether Charlie had been rescued.

“You can’t drive,” Will said. “I don’t even think you can stand.”

Given the current situation and the danger Charlie was still likely in—it wasn’t like Tommy had ever had any luck delegating to Arthur and John, what was to say delegating to Michael would be any different?—that was the wrong thing to say. Tommy pulled his overcoat on, and used Johnny and Will’s shoulders as braces to get to his feet. It probably looked as difficult as it actually was. He looked down his nose at them, trying not to look like maintaining his balance was taking most of his pitiful remains of strength.

“Okay, fine, you can stand,” Will sighed and massaged the bridge of his nose. “My point is still valid.”

“I need to figure out what’s going on,” Tommy repeated. He sounded slightly breathless, which was just pathetic. “So, unless there’s a telephone in one of these vardos and no one ever saw fit to mention it, I’m driving to a phone booth and I’m doing it now. I need to know what happened to my son.”

Johnny looked at Will and shrugged. “You’re not going to be able to talk him out of it,” he said, like Tommy wasn’t there, which was annoying, but bearable as long as he was arguing for what Tommy wanted. “Not when he gets like this.”

Will chewed on his lip, but finally through up his hands in defeat. “Fine, but if you die of a heart attack or aneurysm, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

~~~~

The phone booth was nowhere in particular, just a small structure on the side of a road with no houses in sight in either direction. It was very desolate. It felt like exactly the kind of place you’d receive the worst possible news.

When he pulled up, Tommy sat in the car for a minute, gathering the strength necessary to get up. Johnny had had to help him to the car, because he hadn’t been steady enough on his feet to make it. Will had wanted to come with him, but he didn’t want an audience if the news was bad, so he’d said no as flatly as possible and started the car. The last thing he’d heard as he drove away was Johnny trying to convince Will that it would be fine. He was really lucky people were used to assuming he always knew what he was doing.

As much as he didn’t want to hear bad news, and wasn’t convinced he’d be able to walk the few steps from the car to the phonebooth, he had no other choice. After a minute of kicking himself for being stupid, he pushed the car door open and stepped out.

He made it into the phone booth with only mild stumbling. Panic was quickly overcoming the hard shell of invulnerability he’d been wearing since France, and he could barely speak when the operator answered.

“Hello, Arrow House,” Ada answered when the call connected. She sounded frazzled and tired, but not panicked. He tried to believe that was a good sign.

“Ada,” he breathed, but couldn’t force the question out.

“Tommy!” she said. “It’s alright. Michael brought him back. Father Hughes is dead.”

Something approaching relief washed over him, though most of him wasn’t able to immediately accept that everything was alright. “Let me speak to him,” he demanded.

He almost expected Ada to say something about how he was being rude, but she didn’t. “One minute,” she said and then she was gone.

Tommy waited in tense silence. The time it took Ada to return felt like an eternity, like even longer than he’d been under the ground, but then someone was picking up the phone again and Charlie was on the other end, babbling away in baby-speak. True relief hit him like a wave and his legs almost gave out. He leaned heavily on the phone and tried to sound normal while talking to Charlie. Enough had happened to the poor kid in the last twenty-four hours without if having to know that his dad had been terrified.

Despite his efforts to seem unperturbed, by the time he hung up the phone he couldn’t remember a single word he’d said. He was shaking and felt a bit like he might collapse if he made any sudden movements. He bent forwards until his forehead almost touched the phone. He should get back in the car and continue back to Arrow House, Father Hughes’s death solved a lot of their problems but not all of them—there was still Tatiana to deal with, for example—and he wanted to see Charlie. Charlie, who had been exposed to danger Tommy had never even thought to imagine. Charlie was his fourth or fifth child depending on whether you counted Arthur—something Tommy sometimes did when he was in an especially foul mood—but something like this had never happened before. It was sickening. He’d spent so much time building the family up from practically nothing, what did any of it matter if his son only ended up in a level of danger he had never even though to dream of?

The full weight of that knowledge overwhelmed him. He loved Charlie more than he loved any other living thing, and he’d never wanted anything bad to happen to him. The knowledge that something had happened anyway was crushing.

When he started to cry he wasn’t sure if they were tears of relief that it was over or shame that it had happened to begin with.


End file.
